Who speaks for Fergus? Silence, homophobia, and the anxiety of Yeatsian influence in Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2005 by Russell McDonald

    The later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an
    imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem
    so open again to the precursor's work that at first we might believe
    the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later
    poet's flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert
    itself in the revisionary ratios. But the poem is now held open to
    the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is
    that the new poem's achievement makes it seem to us, not as though
    the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself
    had written the precursor's characteristic work. (15-16, Bloom's
    italics)

Although we would not expect Stephen to reach this final phase in Portrait or Ulysses, he must eventually "hold open" his work to his uncanny precursor in order to become a strong poet himself. Joyce's own gusto for putting his writing out into the world suggests he believed that mature artists must externalize their creative energies in order to overcome the anxiety of a predecessor's influence. Thus, as long as Stephen deals with Yeats through silent containment, he can never fully realize his artistic potential. (6)

We first see Stephen trying silently to come to terms with Yeats in the final chapter of Portrait, when the opening lines of the Countess's death speech from Yeats's play The Countess Cathleen pass through his mind:

    Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel.
    I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
    Upon the nest under the eave before
    He wander the loud waters (Portrait 225, Joyce's italics)

Stephen's recollection of the verses draws a parallel between the Countess's departure for the afterlife upon sacrificing her soul for the Irish people and his own planned departure from Ireland, which he believes will be his sacrifice on behalf of the Irish people, empowering him to recreate them as "a race less ignoble" than the one he knows (238). The text subtly undermines this vainglorious aspiration, however, by following the lines with three paragraphs of kitschy lyric prose that attempt to obfuscate Stephen's silencing of Yeats. The key central paragraph reads:

    A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long
    vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back
    and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and
    mute peal and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he
    had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of
    sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a
    turret quietly and swiftly. (226)

As best he can, Stephen deprives Yeats's words of any power over him. Yeats's "soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away," suggesting that Stephen has muffled the tones of Yeats's words. They noiselessly fall away because Stephen has deprived them of any sonic weight. Moreover, Stephen casts himself as an artistic creator here in the sense of being "within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence" (215), not by creating art out of nothing but by deconstructing Yeats's preexisting art. The repetitions of "soft" and "mute" lyricize Stephen's language while simultaneously reinforcing his silencing of Yeats. The prose implies appreciation for the beauty of Yeats's verse, but it subsumes his words into a literary creation of Stephen's. This "literary creation" remains qualified, however, by its isolation within Stephen's mind. Just as Stephen sits "alone at the side of the balcony" (226) at the Irish Literary Theatre's premiere of The Countess Cathleen and stands alone on the steps of the library watching the birds for augury, he remains trapped in a private world of his own making when he attempts to turn Yeats's old art into new art for Ireland. (7)